WordPress is all about the web, so the web presence for your event is important. To that end, WordCamp Central provides an email address and site hosting with built-in event ticketing so that you don’t have to spend time or money on hosting, and can focus more attention on your event content instead.

Email

Once you are approved as an organizer, we will set up an email forward for your event in the format of city@wordcamp.org. You can have this forward go to any address. Past organizers often asked if they could have wordcamp.org email addresses so that they would look more official when contacting venues, sponsors, etc. Most WordCamps set up a group email on Gmail that all members of the organizing team can access and have us forward the wordcamp.org address to the gmail.com address, but some others have it forward to one person, who’s responsible for routing emails to the correct people. Either approach is fine.

Twitter

You’ll need a Twitter account for your event. Most go for @wordcamp[city name or abbreviation]. If there was a WordCamp in your city before, we can help you get access to the twitter account from the previous organizers. Otherwise, go ahead and create an account using the city@wordcamp.org email address we set up for you. You’ll be asked to pass it on to the next year’s organizing team if you decide not to be involved again.

You’ll want to identify a hashtag for your event. We recommend using #wc[3-letter airport code or shorter city abbreviation). Examples: #wcsf, #wcnyc, #wcsav, #wcsea, #wcpdx, #wcchi. If you try to be clever with your hashtag instead of adopting this standard, you’ll wind up with people guessing at your event, and multiple hashtags will be used. Avoid using any full names/words in hastags, as it cuts into the character count.

When you put out tweets looking for sponsors, volunteers, speakers, etc, or making big announcements, let us know and we can retweet from the main @wordcamp account (and in some cases, from @wordpress as well).

WordCamp sites are all hosted on WordCamp.org using a central multisite platform designed especially for WordCamps that includes ticketing, special templates using custom post types, and a number of plugins. This platform also ties into the WordPress.org profiles, so that participating in a WordCamp as an organizer or speaker will be represented on your WordPress.org profile as a contribution to WordPress. We plan on integrating contributions from sponsors, volunteers, and attendees in the near future as well.

In the past, WordCamps often set up their own sites on their own hosting, and bought various wordcamp[cityname].com domains. Some problems have stemmed from this practice, include disappearing sites, lack of archives, and hostage situations when organizers change from year to year. By centralizing the hosting, we can ensure that each year’s event site will be archived and publicly available, there will not be any ruckus if a new year introduces a new organizer, all WordCamp sites will be following WordPress security and coding standards/best practices, and all WordCamp sites will respect the WordPress trademark and license.

Individual organizing teams cannot upload plugins or themes to WordCamp.org, but if there’s a plugin that you want to use, or a page template for the WordCamp Base theme that you want to submit, just ask. We will be happy to add it, providing it meets the standards for promotion on WordPress.org (security, license, maintainability, etc), or will provide an alternative that offers similar functionality.